May 13, 2012
Facebook IPO--Love It, But Leave It
Facebook will be the largest Internet IPO in history, and would be about 4 times as much as Google was valued at its IPO at $23 billion in 2003.
Further, Facebook could be valued at offering at 99 times earnings.
This is more than the price earnings ratio of 99% of companies in the S&P Index, yet even with some estimating sales of $6.1 billion this year, Facebook would only rank about 400 in the S&P 500.
True Facebook has amassed an incredible 900 million users, but the company's revenue growth has slowed for the 3rd year in a row.
Another article in BusinessWeek (10 May 2012) describes a new social networking contender called Diaspora.
Unlike Google+ which is predominantly a Facebook copycat, Diaspora is bringing something new and major to the table--they are addressing the privacy issues that Facebook has not.
Diaspora is a distributed (or federated) social network, unlike Facebook which is centralized--in other words, Diaspora allows you to host your own data wherever you want (even in the cloud).
Each of these independently owned Diaspora instances or "pods" (dispersed like in the Diaspora) make up a true social "network"--interconnected and interoperable computing devices.
With Diaspora, you own your own data and can maintain its privacy (share, delete, and do what you want with your information), unlike with Facebook where you essentially give up rights to your data and it can and is used by Facebook for commercial use--for them to make money off of your personal/private information.
When it comes to personal property, we have a strong sense of ownership in our society and are keen on protecting these ownership rights, but somehow with our personal information and privacy, when it comes to social networking, we have sold ourselves out for a mere user account.
As loss of personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, identity theft, and other serious computer crimes continues to grow and cost us our money, time, and even our very selves in some respects, alternatives to the Facebook model, like Diaspora, will become more and more appealing.
So with social networks like Facebook--it is a case of love it, but leave it!
Love social networking--especially when privacy is built in--and others don't have rights to what you post.
But leave it--when they are asking for your investment dollar (i.e. IPO) that could be better spent on a product with a business model that is actually sustainable over the long term.
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Allan Cleaver)
May 4, 2012
Leadership Cloud or Flood Coming?
Here is a white paper by London-based Context Information Security (March 2011)
Context rented space from various cloud providers and tested their security.
Overall, it found that the cloud providers failed in 41% of the tests and that tests were prohibited in another 34% of the cases --leaving a pass rate of just 25%!
The major security issue was a failure to securely separate client nodes, resulting in the ability to "view data held on other service users' disk and to extract data including usernames and passwords, client data, and database contents."
The study found that "at least some of the unease felt about securing the Cloud is justified."
Context recommends that clients moving to the cloud should:
1) Encrypt--"Use encryption on hard disks and network traffic between nodes."
2) Firewall--"All networks that a node has access to...should be treated as hostile and should be protected by host-based firewalls."
2) Harden--"Default nodes provisioned by the Cloud providers should not be trusted as being secure; clients should security harden these nodes themselves."
I found another interesting post on "dirty disks" by Context (24 April 2012), which describes another cloud vulnerability that results in remnant client data being left behind, which then become vulnerable to others harvesting and exploiting this information.
In response to ongoing fears about the cloud, some are choosing to have separate air-gaped machines, even caged off, at their cloud providers facilities in order to physically separate their infrastructure and data--but if this is their way to currently secure the data, then is this really even cloud or maybe we should more accurately call it a faux cloud?
While Cloud Computing may hold tremendous cost-saving potential and efficiencies, we need to tread carefully, as the skies are not yet all clear from a security perspective with the cloud.
Clouds can lead the way--like for the Israelites traveling with G-d through the desert for 40 years or they can bring terrible destruction like when it rained for 40 days and nights in the Great Flood in the time of Noah.
The question for us is are we traveling on the cloud computing road to the promised land or is there a great destruction that awaits in a still immature and insecure cloud computing playing field?
(Source Photo: here with attribution to freefotouk)
Leadership Cloud or Flood Coming?
April 17, 2012
Let's Come Clean About The Cloud
The question is were the savings really achievable to begin and how do you know whether we are getting to the target if we don't have an accurate baseline to being with.
From an enterprise architecture perspective, we need to have a common criteria for where we are and where we are going.
The notion that cloud was going to save $5 billion a year as the former federal CIO stated seems to now be in doubt as the article states that "last year agencies reported their projected saving would be far less..."
Again in yet another article in the same issue of Federal Times, it states that the Army's "original estimate of $100 million per year [savings in moving email to the DISA private cloud] was [also] 'overstated.'"
If we don't know where we are really trying to go, then as they say any road will get us there.
So are we moving to cloud computing today only to be moving back tomorrow because of potentially soft assumptions and the desire to believe so badly.
For example, what are our assumptions in determining our current in-house costs for email--are these costs distinctly broken out from other enterprise IT costs to begin? Is it too easy to claim savings when we are coming up with your own cost figures for the as-is?
If we do not mandate that proclaimed cost-savings are to be returned to the Treasury, how can we ensure that we are not just caught up in the prevailing groupthink and rush to action.
This situation is reminiscent of the pendulum swinging between outsourcing and in-sourcing and the savings that each is claimed to yield depending on the policy at the time.
I think it is great that there is momentum for improved technology and cost-savings. However, if we don't match that enthusiasm with the transparency and accuracy in reporting numbers, then we have exactly what happens with what the papers are reporting now and we undermine our own credibility.
While cloud computing or other such initiatives may indeed be the way go, we've got to keep sight of the process by which we make decisions and not get caught up in hype or speculation.
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Opensourceway)
Let's Come Clean About The Cloud
November 27, 2011
Running IT as an Ecosystem
Running IT as an Ecosystem
November 3, 2011
Cloud, Not A Slam Dunk
Cloud, Not A Slam Dunk
October 13, 2011
Increase Security On Your Google Account
After reading the article Hacked! in The Atlantic (November 2011), I looked into Google's new security feature called 2-Step Verification (a.k.a. Two Factor Authentication).
Increase Security On Your Google Account
August 20, 2011
Cloud Second, Security First
Cloud Second, Security First
July 27, 2011
Cloud Computing Presentation by Andy Blumenthal
Cloud Computing Presentation by Andy Blumenthal
June 19, 2011
Crashing The Internet--Are We Prepared?
Almost week after week, I read and hear about the dangers of cyber attacks and whether "the big one" is coming.
Just last week, the Federal Times (13 June 2011) wrote that the "U.S. government computer networks are attacked about 1.8 billion times per month."
Crashing The Internet--Are We Prepared?
June 17, 2011
Apps-The World At Your Fingertips
Apps-The World At Your Fingertips
April 23, 2011
Information-Free Is Invaluable
Information-Free Is Invaluable
March 14, 2011
Watson Can Swim
Watson Can Swim
December 10, 2010
Federal IT Management Reform
Federal IT Management Reform
November 11, 2010
Microsoft’s Three-headed Play
Computerworld, 8 November 2010, has an article called “Ozzie to Microsoft: Simplify, Simplify.” Unless Microsoft can become nimbler and less bureaucratic, they will not be able to keep pace with technology change in the marketplace.
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s departing Chief Software Architect (and Bill Gate’s successor since 2006) has prepared a five-year plan for the company that “exhorts the company to push further into the cloud—or perish.” (Hence, a recent Microsoft stock price that is half of what it was more ten years ago!)
According to Ozzie—and I believe most technology architects today would agree—the future of computing is far less about the PC and Windows and much more about mobile devices and services, which are not traditional core competencies of Microsoft.
The new technology landscape is one that is based on:
- Mobility—access anywhere (smartphones, tablets, and embedded appliances)
- Pervasiveness—access anytime (24/7, “always on”)
- Shared services—access that is hosted and shared, rather than device or enterprise-based.
Despite seeing the future, Microsoft is having trouble changing with the times and many are questioning whether they are in a sense a “one pony show” that can no longer keep up with the other technology innovators such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and others that seem to be riding the mobility and cloud wave.
Wes Miller, a technology analyst, states about Microsoft: “My frustration is that it’s a big ship, and the velocity with which the boat is going will make it hard” for them to move from a PC-centric to a cloud-oriented world. “You’re talking about competing with companies that are, if not out-innovating Microsoft, then outpacing them.”
With the deep bench of intellectual talent and investment dollars that Microsoft has, why are they apparently having difficultly adjusting with the changing technology landscape that their own chief architect is jumping up and down screaming to them to confront head-on?
To me, it certainly isn’t ignorance—they have some of the smartest technologists on the planet.
So what is the problem? Denial, complacency, arrogance, obstinance, accountability, leadership, or is it a combination of these coupled with the sheer size (about 89,000 employees) and organizational complexity of Microsoft—that Ozzie and Miller point out—that is hampering their ability to effectively transform themselves.
This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the small and nimble have outmaneuvered lumbering giants. That’s why according to Fortune Magazine, of Fortune 500 companies, only 62 have appeared on the list every year since 1955, another 1,952 have come and gone. It’s sort of the David vs. Goliath story again and again.
While Microsoft is struggling to keep pace, they are fortunate to have had people like Ray Ozzie pointing them in the right direction, and they have made major inroads with cloud offering for Office365 (Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync—formerly OCS), Windows Azure (service hosting and management), and Hyper V (for server virtualization).
As I see it, Microsoft has 3 choices:
- Change leadership—find someone who can help the company adapt to the changing environment
- Break up the company into smaller, more nimble units or “sub-brands,” each with the autonomy to compete aggressively in their sphere
- Instead of focusing on (the past)—base product enhancements and the “next version,” they need to be thinking completely outside the box. Simply coming out with “Windows 13” is a bit ridiculous as a long-term strategy, as is mimicking competitors’ products and strategies.
As is often the case, this is really isn’t so much a question of the technology, because Microsoft can certainly do technology, but it is whether Microsoft can overcome their cultural challenges and once again innovate and do it quickly like their smaller and more agile rivals.
Microsoft’s Three-headed Play
November 5, 2010
Turning Consumerism Into Collaboration
I’m sure you’ve noticed that we are historically and fundamentally a consumerist society.
We spend a lot of time and money shopping and buying things—many of the things that we buy, we acknowledge that we don’t even need—just check your attic lately? :-)
Many compulsive buyers have even self-proclaimed themselves “shopaholics.”
Aside from being somewhat obsessive compulsive in the way we treat buying and owning things, we tend to be pretty wasteful in buying and throwing out things, often from individualized, single use servings—think fast food, as one example.
The result, according the Environmental Protection Agency (per WiseGeek), the average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day or 1,600 pounds a year (and that doesn’t include industrial waste or commercial trash).
On the flip side of all the tossing out we do, are “hoarders” or those with the tendency to keep lots of things, often piled high in every corner of their homes and offices; there is even a show called by the same on A&E television dedicated to this.
So we shop a lot, spend a lot, buy a lot, and then consume it, hoard it, or toss it. And we do this with enormous volumes of things and in ridiculously rapid cycle times—for example, how many times a week do you find yourself in the stores buying things or then taking out the trash generated from it? (I can practically hear the lyrics of the Hefty commercial playing: ”Hefty, Hefty, Hefty—Stinky, Stinky, Stinky…”)
Overall, it’s a crazy system of conspicuous consumption driven by perceived needs for materialism, highly refined and effective marketing and advertising techniques, and people’s feelings of relative deprivation.
Yet despite these, there is movement underway to change from a society obscured by habits of personal ownership and consumption to a more healthy and balanced approach based on sharing and reuse.
And this is approach for sharing is happening not just in terms of personal consumption, but also in terms of our organizational use of technology, such as in service-oriented architectures, common and enterprise solutions, virtualization, and cloud computing.
We see change happening as a result of the huge financial deficits we have piled on individually, organizationally, and as a nation; the depletion of our vital natural resources (including concerns about our future energy supplies and other limited raw materials like precious metals etc.); and the fear of pollution and the poisoning our planet for future generations.
An interesting article in Wired called “Other Peoples Property” (Sept. 2010) talks about how we are moving finally toward a model of sharing through peer-to-peer renting sites like at www.zilok.com (with 150,000 items listed including cars, vacations, tools, electronics, cloths, and more) and other swapping sites for books, CDs, video games, etc. like www.swaptree.com. Of course, Zipcars and property timeshares are other fashionable examples of this new way of thinking!
Further, the article references a new book by Rachel Botsman called “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption,” about how we are moving to a new consumption model that emphasizes “usefulness over ownership, community over selfishness, and sustainability over novelty.”
With new technologies and tools there is more opportunity than ever to share and reuse, for example:
- Online repositories of goods and advanced search capabilities provides the ability to find exactly what we are looking for.
- Embedding everyday items with microprocessors, networking them, and aiding them with geolocation, enables us to get self-status on their presence, health and availability for use.
- E-commerce, electronic payment, and overnight shipping, gives us the ability to have the items available when and where we need them, and we can then return them for someone else to take their turn to use them.
If we can get over the stigma of sharing and reuse, perhaps, the day is coming when we can think of many non-personal items more in terms of community use and less in terms of mine and yours, and we’ll all be the richer for it.
Turning Consumerism Into Collaboration
August 15, 2010
Engineering An Integrated IT Solution
Traditionally, the IT market has been deeply fragmented with numerous vendors offering countless of products and IT leaders have been left holding the proverbial bag of varied and mixed technologies to interoperate, integrate, optimize, and solve complex organizational problems with.
While competition is a great thing in driving innovation, service, and cost efficiencies, the results of the current fragmented IT market has been that organizations buy value or best of breed technologies from across the vendor universe, only to find that they cannot make them work with their other IT investments and infrastructure.
The result has been a contribution to IT execution that has become notorious for delivering an 82% project failure rate as reported by the Standish group.
Typically, what follows numerous attempts to resuscitate a code blue IT project is the eventual abandonment of the investment, only to be followed, by the purchase of a new one, with hopes of doing it “right” the next time. However, based on historical trends, there is a 4 out of 5 chance, we run into the same project integration issues again and again.
Oracle and other IT vendors are promoting an integration strategy to address this.
Overall, Oracle’s integration strategy is that organizations are envisioned to “buy the complete IT stack” and standup “engineered systems” more quickly and save money than if they have to purchase individual components and start trying to integrate them themselves. Some examples of this are their Exadata Storage Servers and Fusion Applications.
Oracle is not the first company to try this integration/bundling approach and in fact, many companies have succeeded by simplifying the consumers experience such as Apple bringing together iTunes software with the iPod/iPad/Mac hardware or more generally the creation of the smartphone with the integration of phone, web, email, business productivity apps, GPS, games, and more. Similarly, Google is working on its own integration strategy of business and personal application utilities from Google Docs to Google Me.
Of course, the key is to provide a sophisticated-level of integration, simplifying and enhancing the end-user experience, without becoming more generally anticompetitive.
On the other hand, not all companies with integration strategies and product offerings are successful. Some are more hype than reality and are used to drive sales rather than actually deliver on the integration promise. In other words, just having an integration strategy does not integration make.
For the IT leader, choosing best of breed or best of suite is not an easy choice. We want to increase capabilities to our organizations, and we need a solutions strategy that will deliver for our end users now.
While an integration strategy by individual companies can be attractive to simplify our execution of the projects, in the longer-term, cloud computing offers an alternative model, whereby we attach to infrastructure and services outside of our own domains on a flexible, as needed basis and where in theory at least, we do not need to make traditional IT investment on this scale at all anymore.
In the end, a lot of this discussion comes down to security and trust in the solution/vendor and the ability to meet our mission needs cost-effectively without a lot of tinkering to try to put the disparate pieces together.
Engineering An Integrated IT Solution
July 12, 2010
Cloud Computing In Federal Government - Video
Cloud Computing In Federal Government - Video
March 7, 2010
A Turning Point for the Government Cloud
Los Angeles is moving to the cloud, according to Public CIO Magazine March 2010, and “they are the first government of its scale to chose Gmail for the enterprise.”
“It turned out that Washington D.C., was using Gmail for disaster recovery and giving employees the option to use it as their primary e-mail.” But LA is implementing Gmail for more than 30,000 city employees (including police and fire departments) as well as planning to move to Google Apps productivity suite for everything from “calendar, word processing, document collaboration, Web site support, video and chat capabilities, data archiving, disaster recovery and virus protection. “
CTO Randi Levin is leading the charge on the move to cloud computing, and is taking on concerns about cost, data rights, and security.
- On Cost: “The city estimated $5.5 million in hard savings form the Google adoption, and an additional $20 million savings in soft costs due to factors like better productivity.”
- On Data Rights: Nondisclosure agreement with Google includes that the data belong to the city “in perpetuity,” so “if the city wants to switch to another vendor after the contract ends, the city will be able to recall its archived data.”
- On Security: “Google is building a segregated ‘government cloud,” which will be located on the continental U.S. and the exact location will remain unknown to those outside Google. The data will be “sharded”—“shredded into multiple pieces and stored on different servers. Finally, Google will be responsible for “unlimited” damages if there’s a breach of their servers.
LA conducted an request for proposal for software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a hosted solution and received responses for 10 vendors including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Google was selected by an Intradepartmental group of IT managers and a five year contract issued for $17 million.
Currently (since January), LA is conducting a Gmail pilot with about 10% of its city employees, and implementation for the city is slated for mid-June.
Additionally, LA is looking into the possibility of either outsourcing or putting under public-private partnership the city’s servers.
And the interest in government cloud isn’t limited to LA; it is catching on with Google Apps pilots or implementations in places like Orlando, Florida and within 12 federal agencies.
Everyone is afraid to be the first in with a major cloud computing implementation, but LA is moving out and setting the standard that we will all soon be following. It’s not about Google per se, but about realizing the efficiencies and productivity enhancement that cloud computing provides.
A Turning Point for the Government Cloud
November 22, 2009
Personal Technology Trumps Work IT
The pendulum has definitely swung—our personal and home technology is now often better than what we are using in the office.
It wasn’t always that way. Early on, technology was mysterious to those not professionally engaged as system engineers or IT professionals. Technology was expensive and made sense for business purposes, but not for home use. IT was a professional enabler to get the job done, but consumer applications were scarce and not intuitive for anything but the office.
The world has turned upside down. Now as consumers, we are using the latest and greatest computers, smart phones, gaming devices, and software applications, including everything social media and e-Commerce, while in the office, we are running old operating systems, have nerdy phones, locked down computers, applications that aren’t web-enabled, and social media that is often blocked.
The Wall Street Journal (16 November 2009) summed up the situation this way:
“At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete message after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal website feels like being transported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant results…This is the double life many people lead: yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else…The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace--Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter, and so on, but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.”
What gives and why are we somehow loosing our technical edge in the workplace?
Rapid Pace of Change—We have been on technological tear for the last 20 years now; virtually nothing is the same—from the Internet to cloud computing, from cell phones and pagers to smart phones and iPhones, from email to social media, and so much more. From a consumer perspective, we are enamored with the latest gadgets and capabilities to make our life easier and more enjoyable though technology. But at work, executives are tiring from the pace of technological change and the large IT budgets that are needed to keep up with the Jones. This is especially the case, as financial markets have seized in the last few years, credit has tightened, revenue and profitability has been under extreme pressure, and many companies have laid off employees and others have even gone kaput.
Magnificent Technology Failures—Along with the rapid pace of change, has come huge IT project failure rates. The Standish group reported this year that 82% of IT projects are failing or seriously challenged. Why in the world would corporate executives want to invest more money, when their past and present IT investments have been flushed down the toilet? Executives have lost faith in IT’s ability to upgrade their legacy systems and fulfill the promises behind the slew of IT investments already made. Related to this is the question of true cost-benefit and total cost of ownership of all the new technologies and their associated investments—if we haven’t been able to achieve or show the return on investment on all the prior investments, why should we continue investing and investing? Is the payoff really there? Perhaps, we are better off putting the dollars into meeting core mission requirements and not overhead, like IT?
Security Risks Abound—With all the technology has come a whole new organizational risk set in terms of IT security. Organizations are hostage to cyber criminals, terrorists, and hostile nation states who can with a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks disable the company transaction capability, wipe out its memory, steal its information, or otherwise neutralize it from functioning. And the more technology we add, the more the risk level seems to increase. For example, the thinking goes that we were safer when we ran everything in a locked down, tightly controlled, mainframe environment. The more we push the envelope on this and have moved to client server, the web, and now to even more transparency, information sharing, and collaboration—through social media, cloud computing, and World 2.0—the thinking is that we are potentially more open to local and global threats than ever before. Further, with the nation under virtually constant cyberattack and our capabilities to slow or stop these attacks seemingly not existent at this time, executives are reluctant to open up the technology vulnerability spigot any further.
While there are many other reasons slowing or impeding our technology adoption at work, we cannot stop our march of IT advancement and progress.
We are in a global competitive marketplace and the world waits for no one. The problems resulting from the speed and cost of change, the high IT project failure-rate, and the cybersecurity danger/challenges cannot be allowed to inhibit us from progress. We must address these issues head on: We have got to achieve efficiencies from technological advancement and plow the cost-savings into next generation technologies. We have got to drastically improve our IT project success rate though mature implementations of enterprise architecture, IT governance, project management, customer relationship management, and performance measurement (Reference: The CIO Support Services Framework). And we must invest heavily in IT security—with money, people, policy, training, new technology safeguards, and more.
Innovation, technological prowess, and information superiority is what gives us our edge—it is tip of our spear. So yes, we must carefully plan/architect, wisely invest, execute well, and secure our IT. But no, we cannot dismiss the evolving technologies outright nor jump in without proper controls. We must move rationally, but determined into the future.
Personal Technology Trumps Work IT